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{{Short description|Three fictional superstates in the novel 1984 by George Orwell}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:Nations of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four}}
{{italic title|string=Nineteen Eighty-Four}}
{{Use British English|date=October 2011}}
{{Use British English|date=October 2011}}
{{Redirect|English Socialism|socialist movements in England|History of the socialist movement in the United Kingdom}}
{{Multiple issues|
[[File:1984%27s_Geopolitics.png|thumb|upright=1.33|The three fictional superstates of the dystopian novel ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four]]'' are Oceania (black), Eurasia (red), and Eastasia (yellow). 'Disputed territories' are indicated in grey.]]
{{All plot|date=February 2014}}
In [[George Orwell]]'s 1949 [[dystopia]]n novel ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four]]'', the world is divided into three [[superstate]]s: Oceania, [[Eurasia (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|Eurasia]] and [[Eastasia (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|Eastasia]], who are all fighting each other in a [[perpetual war]] in a disputed area mostly located around the [[equator]]. All that Oceania's citizens know about the world is whatever the Party wants them to know, so how the world evolved into the three states is unknown; and it is also unknown to the reader whether they actually exist in the novel's reality, or whether they are a storyline invented by the Party to advance [[social control]]. The nations appear to have emerged from [[nuclear warfare]] and civil dissolution over 20 years between 1945 and 1965, in a post-war world where totalitarianism becomes the predominant form of ideology, through Neo-Bolshevism, English Socialism, and Obliteration of the Self.
{{Primary sources|date=February 2014}}
}}
[[File:1984mapoftheworld.png|alt=|thumb|409x409px|Oceania is coloured in red, Eurasia is blue and Eastasia is cyan on the fictitious 1984 world map.]]
'''Oceania''', '''Eurasia''' and '''Eastasia''' are the three fictional [[superstate]]s in [[George Orwell]]'s [[dystopia]]n novel ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four]]''.


==Sourcing==
How the world evolved into the three states is vague. They appear to have emerged from [[nuclear warfare]] and civil dissolution over 20 years between 1945, the end of [[World War II]], and 1965. Eurasia was likely formed first, followed closely afterwards by Oceania, with Eastasia emerging a decade later, possibly in the 1960s.
[[File:George-orwell-BBC.jpg|thumb|George Orwell, author of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', whose wartime [[BBC]] career influenced his creation of Oceania]]


What is known of the society, politics and economics of Oceania, and its rivals, comes from the [[Fictional book|in-universe book]], ''[[The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism]]'' by [[Emmanuel Goldstein]], a literary device Orwell uses to connect the past and present of 1984.<ref>{{Harvnb|Slater|2003|page=243}}</ref> Orwell intended Goldstein's book to [[parody]] [[Trotsky]]'s (on whom Goldstein is based) ''[[The Revolution Betrayed|The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?]]'', published in 1937.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Decker |first=James M. |title=George Orwell, Updated Edition |publisher=Infobase Publishing |year=2009 |isbn=978-1-4381-1300-5 |editor-last=Bloom |editor-first=Harold |editor-link=Harold Bloom |page=137 |chapter=George Orwell's ''1984'' and Political Ideology}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Freedman |first=Carl |url=https://archive.org/details/incompleteprojec0000free |title=The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture |publisher=Wesleyan University Press |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-8195-6555-6 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/incompleteprojec0000free/page/183 183]}}</ref>
==Oceania==


==Descriptions==
Oceania is the [[superstate]] in which protagonist [[Winston Smith]] dwells. It is believed to be composed of the [[Americas]], the [[British Isles]] (called "Airstrip One" in the novel), [[Iceland]], [[Australia]], [[New Zealand]], [[Polynesia]], and [[Southern Africa]] below the [[River Congo]]. It also controls, to different degrees and at various times during the course of its [[perpetual war]] with either Eurasia or Eastasia, the [[Polar regions of Earth|polar regions]], [[India]], [[Indonesia]], and the [[Oceania|islands of the Pacific]]. Oceania lacks a single capital city, but [[London]] and apparently [[New York City]] may be regional capitals. In the novel, [[Emmanuel Goldstein]], Oceania's declared [[public enemy|public enemy number one]], describes it in the fictional book ''[[The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism]]'' as a result of the [[United States]] having absorbed the [[British Empire]]. Goldstein's book also states that Oceania's primary natural barrier is the sea surrounding it.
===Oceania===
Oceania was founded following an [[Communist revolution|anti-capitalist revolution]],<ref name="auto14">{{Cite book |last=Kalelioğlu |first=Murat |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PlWCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66 |title=A Literary Semiotics Approach to the Semantic Universe of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four |date=3 January 2019 |publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing |isbn=978-1-5275-2405-7 |pages=66ff}}</ref> which, while intended to be the ultimate liberation of its [[proletariat]] (proles), soon ignored them.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kalechofsky |first=R. |url=https://archive.org/details/georgeorwell0000kale |title=George Orwell |publisher=F. Ungar |year=1973 |isbn=978-0-8044-2480-6 |location=New York |page=[https://archive.org/details/georgeorwell0000kale/page/122 122]}}</ref> It is stated that Oceania formed after the [[United States]] merged with the [[British Empire]]. The text, however, does not indicate how the Party obtained the power it possesses or when it did so.<ref name="auto10">{{Cite book |last=Lynskey |first=D. |title=The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 |publisher=Pan Macmillan |year=2019 |isbn=978-1-5098-9076-7 |location=London}}</ref> The state is composed of "the [[Americas]], the [[List of islands in the Atlantic Ocean|Atlantic Islands]], including the [[British Isles]], [[Australasia]] and the [[Southern Africa|southern portion of Africa]]".<ref name="auto3">{{Harvnb|Connelly|2018|pages=140ff}}</ref> Oceania's [[political system]], '''Ingsoc''' (English Socialism, a parody of the British socialist [[Fabian Society]], founded in London in 1884),<ref name="auto1">{{Cite book |last=Ashe |first=Geoffrey |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EKltgn0JVUUC&q=eastasia+++oceania+++eurasia&pg=PA178 |title=Encyclopedia of Prophecy |date=June 28, 2001 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=9781576070796 |via=Google Books}}</ref> uses a [[cult of personality]] to venerate the ruler, [[Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|Big Brother]], as the Inner Party exercises day-to-day power.<ref name="auto7">{{Cite book |last1=Brackett |first1=Virginia |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5J5bAgAAQBAJ&q=eastasia+++oceania+++eurasia&pg=PT2234 |title=Encyclopedia of the British Novel |last2=Gaydosik |first2=Victoria |date=April 22, 2015 |publisher=Infobase Learning |isbn=9781438140681 |via=Google Books}}</ref>


Food rationing, which does not affect Inner Party members, is in place. Winston considers the geography as now stands:
The ruling doctrine of Oceania is [[Ingsoc]], the [[Newspeak]] [[neologism]] for English Socialism. Its nominal leader is [[Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|Big Brother]], believed by the masses to have been the leader of the revolution and still used as an icon by the Party. The [[cult of personality]] is maintained through Big Brother's function as a focal point for love, fear, and reverence, more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.


{{quote|[E]ven the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though [[London]], he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Orwell |first=G. |title=Nineteen Eighty Four |publisher=Penguin |year=2013 |isbn=978-0141391700 |series=Penguin Modern Classics |location=London |page=18}}</ref>}}
The [[lingua franca|unofficial language]] of Oceania is [[English language|English]] (officially called [[Oldspeak]]), and the official language is [[Newspeak]]. The restructuring of the language is intended to eliminate unorthodox political and social thought by eliminating the words needed to express it.


The countryside outside of London is a place not for enjoying the contrast with the city but rather for purely practical grounds of exercise.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Howe |first=Irving |url=https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe |title=1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century |publisher=Harper & Row |year=1977 |isbn=0-06-080660-5 |location=New York |page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/31 31]}}</ref>
The society of Oceania is sharply [[Social stratification|stratified]] into three groups: the small ruling [[Inner Party]], the more-numerous and highly indoctrinated [[Outer Party]], and the large body of politically-meaningless [[Proles]]. Apart from exceptions such as [[Hate Week]], the proles remain essentially outside Oceania's political control and are placated by trivial sports and other entertainment: the [[Thought Police]] manage any Proles who are socially aware enough to be a problem.


Oceania is made up by provinces, one of which is "Airstrip One", as Britain is now known. The whole province is "miserable and run-down"<ref name="auto1"/> with London consisting almost solely of "decaying suburbs".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Gabel |first=Joseph |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=G8UMa5uMb_0C&q=oceania&pg=PA122 |title=Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought |date=January 1, 1997 |publisher=Transaction Publishers |isbn=9781412825825 |via=Google Books}}</ref> Airstrip One is the third most populous province in Oceania, but London is not the capital, for Oceania has none. This decentralisation enables the Party to ensure that each province of Oceania feels itself to be the centre of affairs, and it prevents them from feeling colonised, for there is no distant capital to focus discontent on.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kalelioğlu|2019|pages=[https://books.google.com/books?id=PlWCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66 111–112]}}</ref> 85% of Oceania's population are proles, with most of the remainder presumably in the Outer Party; 2% rule as members of the Inner Party. Winston yearns for revolution and a return to a time before Oceania, says Craig L. Carr, [[Emeritus#In_academia|Professor Emeritus]] of [[Political_science|Political Science]] at the [[Mark_Hatfield#Later_years_and_legacy|Hatfield School of Government]] in [[Portland State University]], but "no revolution is possible in Oceania. History, in Hegelian terms, has ended. There will be no political transformations in Oceania: political change has ended because Big Brother will not let it happen". No political collapse is possible in Oceania, suggests Carr.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Carr |first=Craig L. |title=Orwell, Politics, and Power |publisher=Bloomsbury |year=2010 |isbn=978-1-4411-0982-8 |location=London |page=5}}</ref>
Oceania's [[national anthem]] is ''Oceania, Tis For Thee.''


A totalitarian and highly formalised state, Oceania also has no law,<ref name="auto8">{{Cite book |last=Slater |first=Ian |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Czfu_0o-cmAC&q=oceania&pg=PR227 |title=Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One |date=September 26, 2003 |publisher=McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP |isbn=9780773571532 |via=Google Books}}</ref> only crimes, says Lynskey.<ref name="auto10"/> Nothing is illegal; social pressure is used to exert control, in place of law.<ref>{{Harvnb| Kalechofsky|1973|page=[https://archive.org/details/georgeorwell0000kale/page/112 112]}}</ref> It is hard for citizens to know when they are in breach of Party expectations; and they are in a state of permanent anxiety, unable to think too deeply on any subject whatsoever so as to avoid "thoughtcrime". For example, Winston begins to write a diary and does not know if this is a forbidden offence, but he is reasonably certain of it.<ref name="auto8"/> In Oceania, to think is to do and no distinction is drawn between either.<ref name="auto10"/> Criticism of the state is forbidden, even though criticism must be constant for the state's survival, since it must have critics to destroy so as to demonstrate the state's power.<ref name="auto11">{{Cite book |last=Rai |first=Alok |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9GE4AAAAIAAJ&q=nineteen+eughty+four |title=Orwell and the Politics of Despair: A Critical Study of the Writings of George Orwell |date=August 31, 1990 |publisher=CUP Archive |isbn=9780521397476 |via=Google Books}}</ref> Governance of Oceania depends upon the necessity of suppressing freedom of thought or original thinking amongst the Outer Party (the proles are exempted from this as they are deemed incapable of having ideas).<ref>{{Harvnb| Kalechofsky|1973|page=[https://archive.org/details/georgeorwell0000kale/page/126 126]}}</ref>
<blockquote>Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.<ref>George Orwell, ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', p. 18.</ref></blockquote>


The state is highly bureaucratic. Winston notes that myriad committees are responsible for administration and are "liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years".<ref name="auto11"/> The rulers of Oceania, the Inner Party, says Winston, were once the [[intelligentsia]], the "bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians".<ref>{{Harvnb|Howe|1977|page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/198 198]}}</ref> The state's [[national anthem]] is ''Oceania, 'Tis for Thee''.<ref name="auto10"/> The official language of Oceania is [[Newspeak]]. The official currency of Oceania is the [[dollar]]; in Airstrip One, the [[pound sterling]] has been [[demonetisation (currency)|demonetised]].
Like the rest of Europe, Britain was hit by [[Nuclear weapon|atomic weapons]] in the conflicts before the revolutions in Oceania and then elsewhere. One British town, [[Colchester]], is referenced specifically as having been destroyed; flashbacks to Smith's childhood also include scenes of Londoners taking refuge in the [[London Underground]] tunnels in the midst of the bombing.


==Eurasia==
===Eurasia===
Eurasia comprises "the whole of the northern part of the [[Europe]]an and [[Asia|Asiatic landmass]] from [[Portugal]] to the [[Bering Strait]]".<ref name="auto3"/> Eurasia was formed after the [[Soviet Union]] annexed [[continental Europe]] following a war between the Soviet Union and Allies. The ideology of Eurasia is [[Neo-Bolshevism]].<ref name="auto14"/>


===Eastasia===
It is stated that Eurasia was formed when the [[Soviet Union]] annexed the rest of [[Continental Europe]], creating a single [[polity]] stretching from [[Portugal]] to the [[Bering Strait]]. Orwell frequently describes the face of the standard Eurasian as "mongolic" in the novel. The only soldiers other than Oceanians to appear in the novel are the Eurasians. When a large number of captured soldiers are executed in Victory Square, some [[Slavs]] are mentioned, but the stereotype of the Eurasian maintained by the Party is [[Mongoloid]], like [[O'Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|O'Brien]]'s servant, Martin. This implies that the Party uses [[racism]] to avert sympathy towards an enemy, selectively parading [[Central Asian]] troops in front of the Oceanians.
Eastasia consists of "[[China]] and [[Mainland Southeast Asia|the countries south to it]], the [[Japan|Japanese islands]], and a large but fluctuating portion of [[Manchuria]], [[Mongolia]] and [[Tibet]]". The state's ideology is known as Death-Worship, alternatively known as Obliteration of the Self.<ref name="auto14"/> Eastasia was formed a decade after Eurasia and Oceania in the 1960s, after "confused fighting" between its predecessor nations.<ref name="auto3"/>


===International relations===
According to [[Goldstein's book]], Eurasia's main natural defence is its vast territorial extent, while the ruling ideology of Eurasia is identified as "Neo-[[Bolshevism]]", a variation of the Oceanian "Ingsoc".Sometimes I get really hungry and I eat the living room sofa. It tastes like poo...
The three states have been at war with each other since the 1960s.<ref name="auto3"/> By 1984 it has become a constant, and they regularly change allegiance with one another.<ref name="auto7"/> The perpetual conflict among Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia takes place over a large disputed area, bordering the three states, which includes [[North Africa|Northern]] and [[Central Africa]], the [[Middle East]], the [[Indian subcontinent]], the unstable Eurasian-Eastasian boundary, the [[Arctic ice pack]] and the islands in the [[Indian Ocean|Indian]] and [[Pacific Ocean]]. The majority of the disputed territories form "a rough [[quadrilateral]] with its corners at [[Tangier]], [[Brazzaville]], [[Darwin, Northern Territory|Darwin]] and [[British Hong Kong|Hong Kong]]", containing about a fifth of the population of the [[Earth]]: whichever power controls it disposes of a significant amount of exploitable manpower.<ref>''[[The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism]]'', Chapter III: "War Is Peace".</ref> All three states consist primarily of proles.<ref name="auto9">{{Harvnb|Kalelioğlu|2019|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=PlWCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66 112]}}</ref> Winston recognises similarities with the other superstates, at one point commenting that "it was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, In Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were very much the same."<ref>{{Harvnb|Howe|1977|page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/32 32]}}</ref>


Each state is self-supporting so they do not war over natural resources, nor is the destruction of the opponent the primary objective; for, even when two states ally against the third, no combination is powerful enough to do so.<ref name="auto15">{{Cite book |last=Connelly |first=Mark |title=George Orwell: A Literary Companion |date=26 October 2018 |publisher=McFarland |isbn=978-1-4766-6677-8 |pages=173}}</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Connelly|2018|pages=128}}</ref> Each state recognises that science is responsible for its over-production,<ref name="auto2">{{Harvnb|Slater|2003|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=Czfu_0o-cmAC&q=oceania&pg=PR11 11]}}</ref> so science must be carefully controlled lest the proles or Outer Party expect an increased standard of living.<ref>{{Harvnb|Slater|2003|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=Czfu_0o-cmAC&q=oceania&pg=PR214 214]}}</ref> From this analysis stems the policy of permanent warfare: by focusing production on arms and [[materiel]] (rather than [[consumer goods]]) each state can keep its population impoverished and willing to sacrifice personal liberties for the greater good.<ref name="auto3"/> The peoples of these states—subject to shortages, queues, poor infrastructure and food—"are no longer domesticated or even able to be domesticated", says Carr.<ref>{{Harvnb|Carr|2010|pages=7}}</ref><ref>{{Harvnb|Kalechofsky|1973|page=[https://archive.org/details/georgeorwell0000kale/page/115 115]}}</ref>
==Eastasia==


These states all are similar monolithic regimes.<ref name="auto1"/> Historian [[Mark Connelly]] notes that "the beliefs may differ, but their purpose is the same, to justify and maintain the unquestioned leadership of a totalitarian elite".<ref name="auto3"/> Due to the sheer size of the protagonists, there are, says Connelly, no "massive invasions claiming hundreds of thousands of lives",<ref name="auto15"/> but instead small-scale, local encounters and conflicts which are then exaggerated for the purposes of domestic propaganda.<ref name="auto1"/> Connelly describes the fighting between the states as "highly technical, involving small units of highly trained individuals waging battles in remote contested regions".<ref name="auto15"/> All sides once possessed nuclear weapons, but, following a short-lived resort to them in the 1950s (in which [[Colchester]] was hit)<ref>{{Harvnb|Connelly|2018|pages=129}}</ref> they were recognised as [[Mutual assured destruction|too dangerous for any of them to use]]. As a result, says Connelly, although London could have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon in 1984, it was never hit by anything worse—albeit "20 or 30 times a week"—than "rocketbombs", themselves no more powerful than the [[V-1 flying bomb|V-1]]s or [[V-2 rocket|V-2]]s of World War Two.<ref name="auto15"/>
Eastasia's borders are not as clearly defined as those of the other two superstates, but it is known that they encompass most of modern-day [[Mainland China]] and [[Taiwan]], [[Japan]], and [[Korea]]. Eastasia repeatedly captures and loses [[Indonesia]], [[New Guinea]], and the various [[Pacific islands|Pacific archipelago]]s. Its political ideology is, according to the novel, "called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-worship, but perhaps better rendered as 'Obliteration of the Self'". Orwell does not appear to have based this on any existing [[Chinese language|Chinese]] word or phrase.<ref>The literal translation of "Death-worship" is "死亡崇拜", or ''Sǐwáng chóngbài'', which is not a known religious concept or political philosophy. Related moral concepts may be "殺身成仁", ''shāshēn chéngrén'', ''to die to achieve virtue'', found in ''[[Analects]]''; or "捨身取義", ''shěshēn qǔyì'', ''to give up life for righteousness'', found in ''[[Mencius (book)|Mencius]]'', but the concept of mortal sacrifice for the greater good, and emphasis of collective interests were already used in propaganda of both Nationalist and Communist revolutionaries at the time. Another possibility is that the phrase used is derived somehow from ''[[nirvana]]'' (rendered 涅槃 in Chinese, a transliteration of the original Sanskrit), which if stretched, could be interpreted as "Obliteration of the Self".


At any moment, however, an alliance could shift and the two states that had previously been at war with each other may suddenly ally against the other. When this happened, the past immediately had to be re-written—newspapers retyped, new photos glued over old—to provide continuity. In many cases that which contradicted the state was simply destroyed.<ref name="auto12">{{Cite book |last=Gabel |first=Joseph |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=G8UMa5uMb_0C&q=eastasia+++oceania+++eurasia&pg=PA122 |title=Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought |date=January 1, 1997 |publisher=Transaction |isbn=9781412825825 |via=Google Books}}</ref> This occurs during Oceania's [[Hate Week]], when it is announced that the state is at war with Eastasia and allied to Eurasia, despite the assembled crowd—including Winston and Julia—having just witnessed the executions of Eurasian prisoners of war. Winston describes how, when the announcer spoke, "nothing altered in his voice or manner or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different".<ref>{{Harvnb|Slater|2003|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=Czfu_0o-cmAC&q=oceania&pg=PR207 207]}}</ref> Orwell describes the war as one of "limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological
In comparison, the later North Korean ideology of ''[[Juche]]'' has a roughly-similar trait of difficult translation into English -- as well as similar [[Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|Big Brother]] figures in its [[North Korean cult of personality|veneration]] of the [[Kim dynasty (North Korea)|Kim dynasty]].</ref>
difference".<ref name="auto9"/> These wars, suggests the writer [[Roberta Kalechofsky]], "stimulate the news or 'the truth{{'"}}.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kalechofsky|1973|page=[https://archive.org/details/georgeorwell0000kale/page/116 116]}}</ref>


==Analysis==
Not much information about Eastasia is given in the book. It is known that it is the newest and smallest of the three superstates. According to Goldstein's book, it emerged a decade after the establishment of the other two superstates, placing it somewhere in the 1960s, after years of "confused fighting" among its predecessor nations. It is also said in the book that the industriousness and the [[fecundity]] of the people of Eastasia allow them to overcome their territorial inadequacy in comparison to the other two powers. At the time Orwell wrote the book, East Asians, including the Japanese, all had birth rates higher than those of Europeans.{{citation needed|reason=evidence of racial bias in Orwell's oeuvre, combined with the stereotype in Anglo-American culture of other "races" as fecund, make evidence for this claim necessary|date=January 2016}}
[[File:Cold War WorldMap 1953.png|thumb|[[Cold War]] alliances depicted on a world map for 1953, shortly after the publication of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''.]]
The superstates of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' are recognisably based in the world Orwell and his contemporaries knew while being distorted into a dystopia.<ref name="auto7"/> The critic Alok Rai argues that Oceania, for example, "is a known country", because, while a totalitarian regime set in an alternate reality, that reality is still recognisable to the reader. The state of Oceania comprises concepts, phrases and attitudes that have been recycled—"endlessly drawn upon"—ever since the book was published,<ref name="auto11"/> though political scientist Craig L. Carr argues that they are also places where "things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong".<ref name="auto6">{{Harvnb|Carr|2010|pages=3}}</ref>


Each state is self-supporting and self-enclosed: [[emigration]] and [[immigration]] are forbidden, as are [[international trade]]<ref name="auto5">{{Cite book |last=Behrends |first=Christoph |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0GrdKiybPQEC |title=The Perception of George Orwell in Germany |date=February 2008 |publisher=GRIN |isbn=9783638904667 |via=Google Books}}</ref> and the learning of foreign languages.<ref>{{Harvnb|Howe|1977|page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/30 30]}}</ref> Julia suspects that the war exists for the Party's sake, questioning if it is taking place at all and theorizing that the rocketbombs striking London on a daily basis could have been launched by the Party itself "just to keep people frightened".<ref>{{Harvnb|Kalelioğlu|2019|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=PlWCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66 102]}}</ref>
==Disputed area==


The reader is told, through Winston, that the world has not always been this way, and indeed, once was much better;<ref name="auto7"/> on one occasion with Julia, she produces a bar of old-fashioned [[chocolate]]—the chocolate the Party issued tasted "like the smoke from a rubbish fire"—and it brought back childhood memories from before Oceania's creation.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Parasecoli |first=Fabio |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ddF7L5tEQWcC&q=eastasia+++oceania+++eurasia&pg=PA67 |title=Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture |date=September 1, 2008 |publisher=Berg |isbn=9781847886040 |via=Google Books}}</ref>
The "disputed area", which lies "between the frontiers of the super-states", is a rough quadrilateral with its corners at [[Tangier]], [[Brazzaville]], [[Darwin, Northern Territory|Darwin]], and [[Hong Kong]]".<ref name="Part II, Ch. 9">Part II, Ch. 9.</ref> This area is fought over during the [[perpetual war]] among the three superstates, one of which sometimes controls vast swaths of the disputed territory, only to lose it again. The reason that the three superstates seek to control the area is to harness the large population and the vast resources within the region. Control of the islands in the Pacific and the polar regions is also constantly shifting, but there also, none of the three superpowers ever gains a lasting hold. The inhabitants of the area, having no allegiance to any nation, live in constant slavery under whichever power controls them.


Craig Carr argues that, in creating Oceania and the other warring states, Orwell was not predicting the future, but warning of a possible future if things carried on as they did. In other words, it was also something which could be avoided. Carr continues:
Eastasia and Eurasia fight over "a large but fluctuating portion of [[Manchuria]], [[Mongolia]], and [[Tibet]]".


{{blockquote|It is altogether easy to pick up Nineteen Eighty-Four today, notice that the year that has come to symbolize the story is now long past, realize that Oceania is not with us, and answer Orwell's warning triumphantly by saying, "We didn't!' It is easy, in other words, to suppose that the threat Orwell imagined and the political danger he foresaw have passed.<ref>{{Harvnb|Carr|2010|pages=6}}</ref>}}
At one point during the novel, Julia procures tea to share with Winston and remarks that she thinks Oceania recently captured [[India]] (or perhaps parts of India), but such "control" is usually transient.


===Contemporary interpretations===
==International relations==
[[File:Cleveland Street Work House London.jpg|thumb|A London street in 1930]]
Economist Christopher Dent argued in 2002 that Orwell's vision of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia "turned out to be only partially true. Many of the post-war totalitarian states have toppled, but a tripolar division of global economic and political power is certainly apparent". That is divided, he suggested, between Europe, the United States and Japan.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Dent |first=Christopher M. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qfmEAgAAQBAJ&q=oceania&pg=PA133 |title=The European Economy: The Global Context |date=September 11, 2002 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=9781134780679 |via=Google Books}}</ref> Scholar Christopher Behrends has commented that the proliferation of US airbases in Britain in the 1980s echoes Orwell's classification of the country as an airbase into the European theatre.<ref name="auto5"/> The legal scholar, [[Wolfgang Friedmann]], argued that the growth of supra-state organisations such as the [[Organisation of American States]], "corresponding to the super-states of Orwell's ''1984''&nbsp;... change would be from the power balances of numerous big and small national states to the more massive and potentially more destructive balance of power between two or three blocs of super-Powers".<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hildebrand |first=James L. |date=1973 |title=Complexity Analysis: A Preliminary Step Toward a General Systems Theory of International Law |journal=Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law |volume=3 |issue=271 |page=284}}</ref>


Similarly, in 2007, the [[UK Independence Party]] group in the [[European Parliament]] alleged to the UK's [[House of Commons]]' [[European Scrutiny Committee]] that the [[European Commission]]'s stated aim to make Europe a "World Partner" should be taken to read "Europe as a World Power!", and likened it to Orwell's Eurasia. The group also suggested that the germ of Orwell's superstates could already be found in organisations such as not only the EU, but [[ASEAN]] and [[FTAA]]. Further, the group suggested that the long wars then being waged by American forces against enemies they helped originally create, such as in [[Baluchistan]], were also signs of a germinal 1984-style superstate.<ref>House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee: The European Commission's Annual Policy Strategy 2008 (Thirty-second Report of Session2006–07), vol. II: Oral and written evidence. Evs 28/2.5, 34/2.5.</ref> Lynskey writes how, in 1949, while Orwell was ill but ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' complete, "the post-war order took shape. In April, a dozen Western nations [[North Atlantic Treaty|formed NATO]]. In August, Russia [[RDS-1|successfully detonated its first atom bomb]] in the [[Kazakh Steppe]]. In October, [[Mao Zedong]] [[Proclamation of the People's Republic of China|established the People's Republic of China]]&nbsp;... Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia."<ref name="auto10"/>
The world of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' exists in a state of [[perpetual war]] among the three major powers. Two of the three states are aligned against the third: Oceania and Eurasia against Eastasia or Eurasia and Eastasia against Oceania. However, as Goldstein's book points out, each superstate is so powerful that even an alliance of the other two cannot destroy it, which results in a continuing stalemate. From time to time, one of the states betrays its ally and sides with its former enemy. In Oceania, when that occurs, the [[Ministry of Truth]] [[Historical negationism|rewrites history]] to make it appear that the current state of affairs is the way it has always been, and documents with contradictory information are destroyed in the [[memory hole]].


The campaign associated with the allegations about domestic communism in post-war America, known as [[McCarthyism]], has been compared to the process by which the states of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' re-write their history, in a process that the political philosopher [[Joseph Gabel]] labelled "time mastery".<ref name="auto12"/> Similarly, Winston and Julia's attempts to contact, and await contact from, members of the secret organisation called the Brotherhood, have been compared to the political strategy of [[Kremlinology]], whereby Western powers studied minute changes in the Soviet government in an attempt to foresee events.<ref name="auto2"/> The states' permanent low-level war is similar, says scholar Ian Slater, to [[Vietnam War|that in Vietnam]], except that, in Orwell's imagination, the war is never-ending.<ref>{{Harvnb|Slater|2003|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=Czfu_0o-cmAC&q=oceania&pg=PR215 215]}}</ref> Rai suggests that Oceania, with its labyrinthine bureaucracy, was comparable to the [[Attlee ministry|post-war Labour government]], which found itself in control of what he terms the "extensive apparatus of economic direction and control" that had been set up to regulate supply at the beginning of the [[Second World War]]. According to Rai, London, as described by Winston, is also a perfect match for the post-war city:<ref name="auto11"/>
Goldstein's book states that the war is not a war in the traditional sense but simply exists to use up resources and keep the population in line. Victory for any side is not attainable or even desirable, but the [[Inner Party]], through an act of [[doublethink]], believes that such victory is possible. Although the war began with the limited use of atomic weapons in a limited [[Nuclear warfare|atomic war]] in the 1950s, the combatants all stopped using them for fear of upsetting the [[Balance of power (international relations)|balance of power]]. Relatively few technological advances have been made (the only two mentioned are the replacement of [[Bomber|bombers]] with "[[Missile|rocket bombs]]" and of traditional [[Capital ship|capital ships]] with the immense "floating fortresses"). Examples of both technologies had been developed in the closing stages of [[World War II]]: the [[V-2 rocket|V2 rocket]], the [[Project Habakkuk| ice aircraft carrier]], and the [[Mulberry harbour|floating harbour]].


{{blockquote|He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the [[willow-herb]] straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses.<ref>{{Harvnb|Orwell|2013|page=7}}</ref>}}
==Notes==

In a review of the book in 1950, Symons notes that the gritty, uncomfortable world of Oceania was very familiar to Orwell's readers: the plain food, milkless tea and harsh alcohol were the staples of wartime rationing which, in many cases, had continued after the war.<ref>{{Harvnb|Howe|1977|page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/4 4]}}</ref> Critic [[Irving Howe]] argues that, since then, other events and countries<ref name="auto4">{{Harvnb|Howe|1977|page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/6 6]}}</ref>—[[North Korea]], for example<ref name="auto13">{{Cite book |last=Taylor |first=D. J. |title=On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography |publisher=Abrams |year=2019 |isbn=978-1-68335-684-4 |location=New York}}</ref>—have demonstrated how close Oceania can be.<ref name="auto4"/> Oceania is, he suggests, "both unreal and inescapable, a creation based on what we know, but not quite recognisable".<ref>{{Harvnb|Howe|1977|page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/22 22]}}</ref> Lynskey suggests that Oceania's anthem, "Oceania, Tis For Thee", is a direct reference to the United States (from "[[America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)]]"), as is also, he suggests, the use of the [[dollar sign]] as the Oceanian currency denominator.<ref name="auto10"/>

==Influences==
The totalitarian states of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', although imaginary, were based partly on the real-life regimes of [[Hitler's Germany]] and [[Stalin's Russia]]. Both regimes used techniques and tactics that Orwell later utilised in his novel: the re-writing of history, the cult of leadership personality, purges and show trials, for example. The author [[Czesław Miłosz]] commented that, in his depictions of Oceanian society, "even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who has never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception of Russian life".<ref name="auto11"/> From a purely literary standpoint, suggests [[Julian Symons]], the superstates of 1984 represent points along a path that also took Orwell [[Burmese Days|from Burma]] to [[Homage to Catalonia|Catalonia]], Spain, and [[The Road to Wigan Pier|Wigan]] in England. Symons argues that, in each location, characters are similarly confined a "tightly controlled, taboo-ridden" society, and are as suffocated by them as Winston is in Airstrip One.<ref name="auto11"/> In ''The Road to Wigan Pier'', for example, Orwell examines working-class life in detail; the scene in 1984, where Winston observes a prole woman hanging out her washing echoes the earlier book, where Orwell watches a woman, in the back area of a slum dwelling, attempting to clear a drain pipe with a stick.<ref name="auto13"/>

Orwell's own wartime role in the [[Ministry of Information (United Kingdom)|Ministry of Information]] saw him, says Rai, "experience at first hand the official manipulation of the flow of information, ironically, in the service of 'democracy' against 'totalitarianism{{'"}}. He noted privately at the time that he could see totalitarian possibilities for the BBC that he would later provide for Oceania.<ref name="auto11"/> Lynskey argues that, similarly, during the war, Orwell had to make pro-Soviet broadcasts lauding Britain's ally. After the war—but with the [[Cold War|cold war]] looming—this became an image that needed to be swiftly discarded, and is, according to Lynskey, the historical origin of Oceania's {{lang|fr|bouleversement}} in its alliance during Hate Week.<ref name="auto10"/>

==Comparisons==
The superstates of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' have been compared by literary scholars to other dystopian societies such as those created by [[Aldous Huxley]] in ''[[Brave New World]]'', [[Yevgeny Zamyatin]]'s ''[[We (novel)|We]]'', [[Franz Kafka]]'s ''[[The Trial]]'',<ref>{{Cite book |last=Susser |first=D. |title=Hermeneutic Privacy: On Identity, Agency, and Information |date=2015 |publisher=Stony Brook University PhD |page=67}}</ref> [[B. F. Skinner]]'s ''[[Walden II]]''<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Eslick |first=Leonard J. |date=1971 |title=The Republic Revisited: The Dilemma of Liberty and Authority |journal=World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research |volume=10 |issue=3–4 |pages=171–212, 178}}</ref> and [[Anthony Burgess]]' ''[[A Clockwork Orange (novel)|A Clockwork Orange]]'',<ref>{{Harvnb|Howe|1977|page=[https://archive.org/details/1984revisitedtot00howe/page/43 43]}}</ref> although Orwell's bleak 1940s-style London differs fundamentally from Huxley's world of extensive technical progression or Zamyatin's science- and logic-based society.<ref name="auto6"/> Dorian Lynskey, in his 2019 history book ''[[The Ministry of Truth (Lynskey book)|The Ministry of Truth]]'', also suggests that "equality and scientific progress, so crucial to ''We'', have no place in Orwell's static, hierarchical dictatorship; organised deceit, so fundamental to ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', did not preoccupy Zamyatin".<ref name="auto10"/>

==Sources==
{{reflist}}
{{reflist}}


{{Nineteen Eighty-Four}}
{{1984}}
{{Use British English|date=October 2011}}


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{{DEFAULTSORT:Nations Of Nineteen Eighty-Four}}
[[Category:Fictional elements introduced in 1949]]

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[[Category:Fictional future countries]]<!-- Relative to first publication -->
[[Category:Nineteen Eighty-Four]]
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Latest revision as of 14:13, 22 December 2024

The three fictional superstates of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are Oceania (black), Eurasia (red), and Eastasia (yellow). 'Disputed territories' are indicated in grey.

In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, who are all fighting each other in a perpetual war in a disputed area mostly located around the equator. All that Oceania's citizens know about the world is whatever the Party wants them to know, so how the world evolved into the three states is unknown; and it is also unknown to the reader whether they actually exist in the novel's reality, or whether they are a storyline invented by the Party to advance social control. The nations appear to have emerged from nuclear warfare and civil dissolution over 20 years between 1945 and 1965, in a post-war world where totalitarianism becomes the predominant form of ideology, through Neo-Bolshevism, English Socialism, and Obliteration of the Self.

Sourcing

[edit]
George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose wartime BBC career influenced his creation of Oceania

What is known of the society, politics and economics of Oceania, and its rivals, comes from the in-universe book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, a literary device Orwell uses to connect the past and present of 1984.[1] Orwell intended Goldstein's book to parody Trotsky's (on whom Goldstein is based) The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, published in 1937.[2][3]

Descriptions

[edit]

Oceania

[edit]

Oceania was founded following an anti-capitalist revolution,[4] which, while intended to be the ultimate liberation of its proletariat (proles), soon ignored them.[5] It is stated that Oceania formed after the United States merged with the British Empire. The text, however, does not indicate how the Party obtained the power it possesses or when it did so.[6] The state is composed of "the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa".[7] Oceania's political system, Ingsoc (English Socialism, a parody of the British socialist Fabian Society, founded in London in 1884),[8] uses a cult of personality to venerate the ruler, Big Brother, as the Inner Party exercises day-to-day power.[9]

Food rationing, which does not affect Inner Party members, is in place. Winston considers the geography as now stands:

[E]ven the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.[10]

The countryside outside of London is a place not for enjoying the contrast with the city but rather for purely practical grounds of exercise.[11]

Oceania is made up by provinces, one of which is "Airstrip One", as Britain is now known. The whole province is "miserable and run-down"[8] with London consisting almost solely of "decaying suburbs".[12] Airstrip One is the third most populous province in Oceania, but London is not the capital, for Oceania has none. This decentralisation enables the Party to ensure that each province of Oceania feels itself to be the centre of affairs, and it prevents them from feeling colonised, for there is no distant capital to focus discontent on.[13] 85% of Oceania's population are proles, with most of the remainder presumably in the Outer Party; 2% rule as members of the Inner Party. Winston yearns for revolution and a return to a time before Oceania, says Craig L. Carr, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Hatfield School of Government in Portland State University, but "no revolution is possible in Oceania. History, in Hegelian terms, has ended. There will be no political transformations in Oceania: political change has ended because Big Brother will not let it happen". No political collapse is possible in Oceania, suggests Carr.[14]

A totalitarian and highly formalised state, Oceania also has no law,[15] only crimes, says Lynskey.[6] Nothing is illegal; social pressure is used to exert control, in place of law.[16] It is hard for citizens to know when they are in breach of Party expectations; and they are in a state of permanent anxiety, unable to think too deeply on any subject whatsoever so as to avoid "thoughtcrime". For example, Winston begins to write a diary and does not know if this is a forbidden offence, but he is reasonably certain of it.[15] In Oceania, to think is to do and no distinction is drawn between either.[6] Criticism of the state is forbidden, even though criticism must be constant for the state's survival, since it must have critics to destroy so as to demonstrate the state's power.[17] Governance of Oceania depends upon the necessity of suppressing freedom of thought or original thinking amongst the Outer Party (the proles are exempted from this as they are deemed incapable of having ideas).[18]

The state is highly bureaucratic. Winston notes that myriad committees are responsible for administration and are "liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years".[17] The rulers of Oceania, the Inner Party, says Winston, were once the intelligentsia, the "bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians".[19] The state's national anthem is Oceania, 'Tis for Thee.[6] The official language of Oceania is Newspeak. The official currency of Oceania is the dollar; in Airstrip One, the pound sterling has been demonetised.

Eurasia

[edit]

Eurasia comprises "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait".[7] Eurasia was formed after the Soviet Union annexed continental Europe following a war between the Soviet Union and Allies. The ideology of Eurasia is Neo-Bolshevism.[4]

Eastasia

[edit]

Eastasia consists of "China and the countries south to it, the Japanese islands, and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet". The state's ideology is known as Death-Worship, alternatively known as Obliteration of the Self.[4] Eastasia was formed a decade after Eurasia and Oceania in the 1960s, after "confused fighting" between its predecessor nations.[7]

International relations

[edit]

The three states have been at war with each other since the 1960s.[7] By 1984 it has become a constant, and they regularly change allegiance with one another.[9] The perpetual conflict among Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia takes place over a large disputed area, bordering the three states, which includes Northern and Central Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, the unstable Eurasian-Eastasian boundary, the Arctic ice pack and the islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean. The majority of the disputed territories form "a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong", containing about a fifth of the population of the Earth: whichever power controls it disposes of a significant amount of exploitable manpower.[20] All three states consist primarily of proles.[21] Winston recognises similarities with the other superstates, at one point commenting that "it was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, In Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were very much the same."[22]

Each state is self-supporting so they do not war over natural resources, nor is the destruction of the opponent the primary objective; for, even when two states ally against the third, no combination is powerful enough to do so.[23][24] Each state recognises that science is responsible for its over-production,[25] so science must be carefully controlled lest the proles or Outer Party expect an increased standard of living.[26] From this analysis stems the policy of permanent warfare: by focusing production on arms and materiel (rather than consumer goods) each state can keep its population impoverished and willing to sacrifice personal liberties for the greater good.[7] The peoples of these states—subject to shortages, queues, poor infrastructure and food—"are no longer domesticated or even able to be domesticated", says Carr.[27][28]

These states all are similar monolithic regimes.[8] Historian Mark Connelly notes that "the beliefs may differ, but their purpose is the same, to justify and maintain the unquestioned leadership of a totalitarian elite".[7] Due to the sheer size of the protagonists, there are, says Connelly, no "massive invasions claiming hundreds of thousands of lives",[23] but instead small-scale, local encounters and conflicts which are then exaggerated for the purposes of domestic propaganda.[8] Connelly describes the fighting between the states as "highly technical, involving small units of highly trained individuals waging battles in remote contested regions".[23] All sides once possessed nuclear weapons, but, following a short-lived resort to them in the 1950s (in which Colchester was hit)[29] they were recognised as too dangerous for any of them to use. As a result, says Connelly, although London could have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon in 1984, it was never hit by anything worse—albeit "20 or 30 times a week"—than "rocketbombs", themselves no more powerful than the V-1s or V-2s of World War Two.[23]

At any moment, however, an alliance could shift and the two states that had previously been at war with each other may suddenly ally against the other. When this happened, the past immediately had to be re-written—newspapers retyped, new photos glued over old—to provide continuity. In many cases that which contradicted the state was simply destroyed.[30] This occurs during Oceania's Hate Week, when it is announced that the state is at war with Eastasia and allied to Eurasia, despite the assembled crowd—including Winston and Julia—having just witnessed the executions of Eurasian prisoners of war. Winston describes how, when the announcer spoke, "nothing altered in his voice or manner or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different".[31] Orwell describes the war as one of "limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference".[21] These wars, suggests the writer Roberta Kalechofsky, "stimulate the news or 'the truth'".[32]

Analysis

[edit]
Cold War alliances depicted on a world map for 1953, shortly after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four are recognisably based in the world Orwell and his contemporaries knew while being distorted into a dystopia.[9] The critic Alok Rai argues that Oceania, for example, "is a known country", because, while a totalitarian regime set in an alternate reality, that reality is still recognisable to the reader. The state of Oceania comprises concepts, phrases and attitudes that have been recycled—"endlessly drawn upon"—ever since the book was published,[17] though political scientist Craig L. Carr argues that they are also places where "things have gone horribly and irreparably wrong".[33]

Each state is self-supporting and self-enclosed: emigration and immigration are forbidden, as are international trade[34] and the learning of foreign languages.[35] Julia suspects that the war exists for the Party's sake, questioning if it is taking place at all and theorizing that the rocketbombs striking London on a daily basis could have been launched by the Party itself "just to keep people frightened".[36]

The reader is told, through Winston, that the world has not always been this way, and indeed, once was much better;[9] on one occasion with Julia, she produces a bar of old-fashioned chocolate—the chocolate the Party issued tasted "like the smoke from a rubbish fire"—and it brought back childhood memories from before Oceania's creation.[37]

Craig Carr argues that, in creating Oceania and the other warring states, Orwell was not predicting the future, but warning of a possible future if things carried on as they did. In other words, it was also something which could be avoided. Carr continues:

It is altogether easy to pick up Nineteen Eighty-Four today, notice that the year that has come to symbolize the story is now long past, realize that Oceania is not with us, and answer Orwell's warning triumphantly by saying, "We didn't!' It is easy, in other words, to suppose that the threat Orwell imagined and the political danger he foresaw have passed.[38]

Contemporary interpretations

[edit]
A London street in 1930

Economist Christopher Dent argued in 2002 that Orwell's vision of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia "turned out to be only partially true. Many of the post-war totalitarian states have toppled, but a tripolar division of global economic and political power is certainly apparent". That is divided, he suggested, between Europe, the United States and Japan.[39] Scholar Christopher Behrends has commented that the proliferation of US airbases in Britain in the 1980s echoes Orwell's classification of the country as an airbase into the European theatre.[34] The legal scholar, Wolfgang Friedmann, argued that the growth of supra-state organisations such as the Organisation of American States, "corresponding to the super-states of Orwell's 1984 ... change would be from the power balances of numerous big and small national states to the more massive and potentially more destructive balance of power between two or three blocs of super-Powers".[40]

Similarly, in 2007, the UK Independence Party group in the European Parliament alleged to the UK's House of Commons' European Scrutiny Committee that the European Commission's stated aim to make Europe a "World Partner" should be taken to read "Europe as a World Power!", and likened it to Orwell's Eurasia. The group also suggested that the germ of Orwell's superstates could already be found in organisations such as not only the EU, but ASEAN and FTAA. Further, the group suggested that the long wars then being waged by American forces against enemies they helped originally create, such as in Baluchistan, were also signs of a germinal 1984-style superstate.[41] Lynskey writes how, in 1949, while Orwell was ill but Nineteen Eighty-Four complete, "the post-war order took shape. In April, a dozen Western nations formed NATO. In August, Russia successfully detonated its first atom bomb in the Kazakh Steppe. In October, Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China ... Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia."[6]

The campaign associated with the allegations about domestic communism in post-war America, known as McCarthyism, has been compared to the process by which the states of Nineteen Eighty-Four re-write their history, in a process that the political philosopher Joseph Gabel labelled "time mastery".[30] Similarly, Winston and Julia's attempts to contact, and await contact from, members of the secret organisation called the Brotherhood, have been compared to the political strategy of Kremlinology, whereby Western powers studied minute changes in the Soviet government in an attempt to foresee events.[25] The states' permanent low-level war is similar, says scholar Ian Slater, to that in Vietnam, except that, in Orwell's imagination, the war is never-ending.[42] Rai suggests that Oceania, with its labyrinthine bureaucracy, was comparable to the post-war Labour government, which found itself in control of what he terms the "extensive apparatus of economic direction and control" that had been set up to regulate supply at the beginning of the Second World War. According to Rai, London, as described by Winston, is also a perfect match for the post-war city:[17]

He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses.[43]

In a review of the book in 1950, Symons notes that the gritty, uncomfortable world of Oceania was very familiar to Orwell's readers: the plain food, milkless tea and harsh alcohol were the staples of wartime rationing which, in many cases, had continued after the war.[44] Critic Irving Howe argues that, since then, other events and countries[45]North Korea, for example[46]—have demonstrated how close Oceania can be.[45] Oceania is, he suggests, "both unreal and inescapable, a creation based on what we know, but not quite recognisable".[47] Lynskey suggests that Oceania's anthem, "Oceania, Tis For Thee", is a direct reference to the United States (from "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)"), as is also, he suggests, the use of the dollar sign as the Oceanian currency denominator.[6]

Influences

[edit]

The totalitarian states of Nineteen Eighty-Four, although imaginary, were based partly on the real-life regimes of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Both regimes used techniques and tactics that Orwell later utilised in his novel: the re-writing of history, the cult of leadership personality, purges and show trials, for example. The author Czesław Miłosz commented that, in his depictions of Oceanian society, "even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who has never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception of Russian life".[17] From a purely literary standpoint, suggests Julian Symons, the superstates of 1984 represent points along a path that also took Orwell from Burma to Catalonia, Spain, and Wigan in England. Symons argues that, in each location, characters are similarly confined a "tightly controlled, taboo-ridden" society, and are as suffocated by them as Winston is in Airstrip One.[17] In The Road to Wigan Pier, for example, Orwell examines working-class life in detail; the scene in 1984, where Winston observes a prole woman hanging out her washing echoes the earlier book, where Orwell watches a woman, in the back area of a slum dwelling, attempting to clear a drain pipe with a stick.[46]

Orwell's own wartime role in the Ministry of Information saw him, says Rai, "experience at first hand the official manipulation of the flow of information, ironically, in the service of 'democracy' against 'totalitarianism'". He noted privately at the time that he could see totalitarian possibilities for the BBC that he would later provide for Oceania.[17] Lynskey argues that, similarly, during the war, Orwell had to make pro-Soviet broadcasts lauding Britain's ally. After the war—but with the cold war looming—this became an image that needed to be swiftly discarded, and is, according to Lynskey, the historical origin of Oceania's bouleversement in its alliance during Hate Week.[6]

Comparisons

[edit]

The superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been compared by literary scholars to other dystopian societies such as those created by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Franz Kafka's The Trial,[48] B. F. Skinner's Walden II[49] and Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange,[50] although Orwell's bleak 1940s-style London differs fundamentally from Huxley's world of extensive technical progression or Zamyatin's science- and logic-based society.[33] Dorian Lynskey, in his 2019 history book The Ministry of Truth, also suggests that "equality and scientific progress, so crucial to We, have no place in Orwell's static, hierarchical dictatorship; organised deceit, so fundamental to Nineteen Eighty-Four, did not preoccupy Zamyatin".[6]

Sources

[edit]
  1. ^ Slater 2003, p. 243
  2. ^ Decker, James M. (2009). "George Orwell's 1984 and Political Ideology". In Bloom, Harold (ed.). George Orwell, Updated Edition. Infobase Publishing. p. 137. ISBN 978-1-4381-1300-5.
  3. ^ Freedman, Carl (2002). The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture. Wesleyan University Press. pp. 183. ISBN 978-0-8195-6555-6.
  4. ^ a b c Kalelioğlu, Murat (3 January 2019). A Literary Semiotics Approach to the Semantic Universe of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 66ff. ISBN 978-1-5275-2405-7.
  5. ^ Kalechofsky, R. (1973). George Orwell. New York: F. Ungar. p. 122. ISBN 978-0-8044-2480-6.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h Lynskey, D. (2019). The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984. London: Pan Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-5098-9076-7.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Connelly 2018, pp. 140ff
  8. ^ a b c d Ashe, Geoffrey (June 28, 2001). Encyclopedia of Prophecy. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781576070796 – via Google Books.
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